Happy HalloWeena

Evil Demon Found on Local Farm

The Evil Rowena Demon

Does this devil tail make her butt look big?

Joe The Manure Plumber

Oh, and just a note before you send me something about a poor plumber who's against that evile Obama.

"Joe the Plumber" isn't a licensed plumber and is actually plumbing illegally. He has lied (oh imagine that... I bet you don't remember Jeff Gannon, former White House Press Corps and frequent after hours visitor to the White House, who said he was a reporter but was really a gay prostitute). Not only that, but turns out old "Sam/Joe" hasn't paid his state taxes. He is also not "planning" to buy the plumbing business that he is illegally working for. "Planning" requires a plan, otherwise it's called "wishin'". (I know about wishin'. I wish an owl would bring me a letter asking me to live at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.) Don't you always ask for licensed contractors when you have something important done?? "Joe the Plumber", as my husband points out, is actually Joe Blow.

The real Joe Plumbers are the licensed plumbers, you know, the ones who are backing Obama because they don't make $250,000.00 a year.

Don't be telling ME to "Wake Up!"

Okay. I really need to get this off my chest because I find things like this really rude.

I have constantly said that I live in a great neighborhood. I do. I like my neighbors. Several of them I like a whole heckuvalot. I don't care that they are Republicans. I'm assuming they don't care that I'm a Democrat because they still call me up to chat. Mostly, we don't talk about politics at all. I've always found that most people are more alike than they are different. We all care about the same stuff, mostly. I don't feel that Fox News and the various republican run websites are legitimate sources for factual information, so I personally feel their beliefs are misguided. I can wish all day long that some of them would look the information up on legitimate non-partisan websites, but that doesn't mean I won't like them if they don't. Unless, they shriek at me in my email box. At that point, they are treading on very thin ice, but even then I put up with it and try my damnedest to ignore them. I have filtered all forwards out of my inbox. I have actually blocked a good friend because her husband was sending me about 10-20 forwards a day. Now I have to go into my Trash folder once a week to see if she has written me an actual letter. When I'm there, I have to look at the insulting garbage mail one person constantly feels compelled to send me. The last one was choice.

I went to my trash folder to check and see if any letters from my buddy Joann were in there. What did I find? I found something to "Obama's 'FANS'" which was just another stupid, rude, insulting, ill informed forward, but what got my goat is that before the huge lists of other people's emails, (why do people feel compelled to forward and reforward and continue to forward thus giving me 3 feet of other people's private email addresses. I'd like to reiterate that this is a very rude practice. Not to mention stupid. If someone's email gets hacked, gee thank you very much for giving the hacker all these extra spam recipients!) anyway, before the forwards, in capital letters, italicized were the words "WAKE UP!!!" I could practically hear the keys being pounded in anger. Welp. That woke me up better than 4 cups of coffee.

It woke me up to the point that I decided it's getting harder and harder to keep you as a friend and one more thing like that and there is about to be yet another person you don't get along with on this road. Don't be shrieking at me to "wake up". My last vote didn't get us into the messes we're currently in and you are the one fixin' to do that all over again. I've been using the internet for legitimate research for 13 years. I've been online for 14 years. In 1993 it was well known that if you address someone in capital letters, you are shouting at them. I'll not be shouted at in my own email box. I've sent you nothing that would warrant such behavior and never would.

I never forward anything other than our online Satellite bill and that only goes to my husband. That's it. If anyone gets something from me, it's from me. It's not me giving their private email addresses to every person in my contact list (which is like the rudest thing ever, are you going to call all your buddies up and give them my unlisted phone number while you're at it?). It's not me making no greater effort to keep in touch than to hit the forward button. No, if you get something from me, it's just from me. I might cut and paste a joke that I think you in particular might find funny, but I don't just clog the internet sending 100 people a joke. I also include a note.

Therefore I must ask, what in the last 3 years has ever made you think I want right wing propaganda in my email box? I seem to remember asking you several times to take me off the list of people you forward that garbage to. I told you then that I'd love to get letters from you to tell me how you are doing, but that I did not want any more forwards. I seem to remember gently pointing out the decided lack of facts in these forwards... a dozen or so times. So why on god's green earth do you send me junk you should know by now is both unwelcome and nonfactual? You must not care about me as much as I cared about you since you continue to send me this crap. You must have no respect for me at all to send me stuff when I've politely asked you to stop. I don't think this is a very nice way to treat someone that has always been kind to you. If you cannot take the brief time it takes to remove my email address from the forwards you send out when you know I find them insulting and that I don't want my email address spread among your friends, their friends, their friends friends, etc., then why would I take the much greater time it takes to be a friend?

Public Enemy Numbers One and Two

Mickey da Rat: Public Enemy Number One

Rocky da Squirrel: Public Enemy Number Two

I went out through the garage on my way to feed the horses one night several weeks ago and something large and furry raced out from under the shelves in the corner and ran under my truck. I got down on my sore knees to see what it was but it had disappeared out into the desert darkness. I thought.

I caught glimpses of the critter hopping at blinding speed across the patio and several more times in the garage over the next couple of weeks. It never slowed down enough to get a really good look at it, which is probably a good thing. I might have developed an emotional attachment if I'd been able to see it well. I knew it was a largish rodent. I knew it had big, round, Mickey Mouse-like ears. I Googled Arizona rodent images and discovered our new critter was a Pack Rat. "Aww how CUTE!" I thought and then spent a few minutes giggling about model parts, shiny bolts and such disappearing from the garage, only to turn up in a cozy little nest somewhere.

Just about the time I saw the pack rat for the first time, the engine light came on yet again in my truck. I'd just taken the darned thing in two weeks before and two weeks before that and two weeks before that. This particular week I just didn't have time to sit in town an entire day while the dealership figured out what was wrong this time, so I ignored the light.

The following week, the truck started dying at traffic lights. I called and made an appointment to have the dealership check out this latest problem. "Thank heaven for warranties!" Over the weekend the "Check Fuel Cap" warning came on. I checked the fuel cap. It was there. It was on. "Fab. Just fab." I added this latest nuisance to the growing list I would present to the service department.

In the meantime, the pack rat continued to play in the garage. I did begin to worry when I found a small pile of pack rat poop under my truck one morning. We did begin to wonder what was going on when we began to find small shreds of chewed rubber in the garage and on the driveway. Nothing, however, prepared me for Roger at the service department handing me a totally chewed up vacuum hose and the oxygen sensor with mangled wiring and telling me "You have a friend." Apparently pack rats (which we now have) AND ground squirrels which we have had an over abundance of since last April, love the taste of greasy rubber truck parts.

Rat chewed truck parts are not covered by warranty. $512.00 and 7 hours later, the truck runs fine. Truck ran great, as a matter of fact, straight to Safeway for a box of rat treats. $5.00 later there's a cache of lovely green hors d' oeuvres in each corner of the garage and a small offering under the truck at night. A friend suggested that we just park in the garage at night. Since the ground squirrels chewed big access holes in the rubber strip at the bottom of the door, it hardly seems worthwhile to empty the garage so that the vehicles will fit. The rodents would probably just think we'd done them a service by delivering dinner to their doors.

The Evidence

Twilight: Enter another dumb heroine.

I read youth fiction because I find it much more intelligent than the general "women's mystery". I'm always on the lookout for a good story in this genre. On one of my trips to Barnes and Noble I picked up a copy of the first book in the Twilight series. I was told the author was a "local" so I was excited to support a local author and I'd heard many people say how much they loved the series. That is all I knew about the book when I picked it up.

I read. I waited for something to happen. I read more. Praying for something to happen. I read further telling myself that someone or something was going to hit "Bella" in the head and knock some sense into her. No such luck. I got to the end of the book and something finally did happen. Some other vampire tracked our heroine to a dance studio and, to my ever lasting chagrin, did not manage to rip her into so many pieces that the story could no longer continue.

As I've mentioned before I'm a huge fan of the Harry Potter novels. I thought for sure that the character of Hermione Granger had forever put an end to tepid, goody-goody, nonsense driven, female characters, at least in youth fiction (nothing, of course, will put an end to them in adult women's fiction). Hermione has every wondrous feminine emotion, yet she does not allow herself to be a slave to those emotions. She has spunk. She has common sense. She is intelligent. She does not spend 7 books swooning over Ron Weasley. We saw how stupid that looked when Lavender Brown spent most of her lines crooning sappily to "Won Won" and giggling like someone who might well be 3 or 4 bricks shy of a full load. Well, on second thought, let me rephrase that. The relationship between Lavender and Ron clearly showed how silly that kind of empty headed adoration looks. With the popularity of "Twilight" it's obvious that a lot of Potter fans didn't learn from that lesson.

Hermione, often quite literally, pulled both Harry and Ron out of more tight binds than I can count. She did not sit still waiting for "Won Won" or handsome and famous Harry to rescue her. Hermione is a heroine who stands on her own small feet and often saves the day. She doesn't wait for someone to tell her when to act or how to act or what to believe. Hermione LOOKS STUFF UP and researches the answers to all the problems and mysteries that plague them. Hermione was a giant leap forward in the world of fictional female heroines.

Back to "Bella", the heroine of the Twilight series, or should I say back up 50 years to the world of the feckless, wimpy, damsel-in-distress, who likens a sparkling dead guy to a "god" and spends an entire book sighing wistfully. Okay, she doesn't sigh through the entire book. She bounces back and forth between sighing and wondering if "Edward" likes her or doesn't like her and why he doesn't like her and then sighing and shivering and getting all goose pimply. I swear to you that by the end of the book, if I could have crawled into the pages I'd have killed the little dimwit off myself.

Years ago, back in the dark ages of the Reagan years, a talking Barbie caused a big stir because one of her pre-recorded lines was "Math is SOOO hard". 20 some odd years later we have "Bella", the village idiot, inspiring our young women to do nothing more than dream about, sigh over, and rely upon young men who look like gods. Back in the Reagan years we stood up to the brainless role models like Barbie. We, and Murphy Brown, battled Mr. Dan "Potatoe"-head Quayle as he waged his war against single, working mothers. Why are we, and our girls, now swooning over this "Twilight" tripe??

When faced with the dilemma of "Twilight" and "Half-Blood Prince" competing against each other this winter, Warner Bros. decided to move one of the movies clear out to next summer. In spite of all the hype, the trailers, the toys and games all set to be released in conjunction, it was "Half-blood Prince" that got knocked out of the line up. The bimbo movie for young teens won out over the story and characters of substance. What does that say about the U.S. entertainment industry? Well... it IS the industry that made Paris Hilton a star afterall.

In Memory of Poopie kitty and Oberon

On my old AOHell website, I had a section for pet stories because our pets are a large portion of our lives. I found these pet stories were still online for some reason, even though I no longer have that account.


We lost our eldest kitty just a few months after we moved into our new house. I think Oberon was simply waiting until she knew we were settled before she moved on. She was about 18 years old.


Yesterday evening we lost our Poopie kitty who was about 17. Thus, this morning I decided to move some of our old pet stories here to the blog.

Party at Poopie's Pad!

All the critters here get treats from Pupperoni to Tender Vittles, but as wild as Elmo gets for his junk food, the cats make him look positively sedate when we offer them Catnip. The best is the fresh herb you can buy at almost any local nursery. We have tried twice to keep these catnip plants alive. The first time we tried keeping one in a pot in various window sills but it failed to survive after numerous "accidents", when it was knocked onto the floor. Perhaps in a closet under a grow light would have worked better. The second time we decided to hide it in our herb garden amid other odiferous herbs such as spearmint, garlic chives and rosemary.

As we were puttering in the front flower/herb bed, the cats came by to offer advice but took no real note of what we were planting, we thought. We already had a good crop of spearmint going and we planted several bunches of garlic chives, a couple of basil plants and a few marigolds for color. Centered in the mint and new herbs we planted one small Catnip plant, watered the area down well and went inside to congratulate ourselves on being able to hide the nip. We kept watch on the garden all that day, but no cats bothered to investigate further and we fell asleep that night secure that at last we'd found a safe place to cultivate kitty treats.

The next morning I woke up, made a pot of coffee, opened the blinds and sat down with a cup to enjoy the morning. As I gazed out at the garden, my sleep fogged mind began to register something terribly amiss. I thought we'd planted more than that yesterday... I went outside for closer inspection. There, where our lovely herb garden had been the evening before was a large patch of damp earth, packed so smooth I could have laid down a cement patio addition. Our lovely herbs and marigolds were stamped into the earth and the entire area was covered with a thick layer of various colors and lengths of cat hair, some of which matched our cats, but much of which did not. In some areas there were puddles of, well there's no truly polite way to say this, DROOL.

Obviously at some point in the dark of night our cats had sniffed out the nip and then proceeded to invite all their friends from the neighborhood over for aparty at Poopie's pad. Since the drool was still apparent, I'm guessing the party didn't end until dawn when the last of the neighborhood felines staggered home and our little "angels" came inside, curled up and passed out in dark corners. Not a cat was to be seen in our neighborhood for the remainder of the day. Must have been SOME party!

Meet Minerva

Due to an apparent catastrophic illness on the part of my little electric quad, aka the "Shrieking Eel", I decided I needed to move up a couple of rungs on the ladder of farm-mobiles. Meet my new, gently used 2006 Honda Recon 250. I have dubbed her Minerva, as she wears a green cloak and is somewhat shorter than Albus the white F-150.

Minerva has already proven to be a MUCH more comfortable ride than the Shrieking Eel, she doesn't have difficulty maneuvering the sand, gravel and eroded terrain in the dry wash, and she doesn't make any more noise than the supposedly "quiet" electric quad. Minerva's gentle contralto rumble is much more pleasing than the Eels uber-soprano shriek.

As you can see in the photos, my crutches are already bungeed to the handy dandy crutch carrying rack. I had to sit on my crutches when riding the Eel. Not very comfy.